Israel’s Foreign Ministry slammed the committee of a prestigious US award on Friday for handing a top prize to a Palestinian photojournalist who has been accused of being embedded with the thousands of Hamas-led terrorists who overran southern Israeli communities on October 7.
New York Times photographer Yousef Masoud won the George Polk award for photojournalism this week for photographs of the shock Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, which began with barrages of early-morning rockets aimed at southern and central Israel as terrorists invaded and went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Terrorists also took 253 hostages into Gaza on that day.
Itay Milner, a spokesperson for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, wrote a letter to the award committee at Long Island University, cited by Ynet News, “to express grave concern over your 2024 George Polk Award selections.”
The winners also include Palestinian photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf for his images from inside Gaza, where the devastating war has waged for over four months.
Milner said “equally troubling is the specific awarding of Yousef Masoud, whose public connections to Hamas and well-documented foreknowledge of the terror group’s plans for invasion mortally compromise the integrity of his reporting,” in the letter.
“By honoring Masoud, the George Polk Awards endorse a journalist whose work is deeply tainted, sending a dangerous message that journalistic recognition can be altogether divorced from any semblance of ethics. Masoud was intimately tied to a vicious terror group designated as such by the US, the EU and much of the civilized world,” he went on.
“Awarding those complicit with crimes against humanity crushes the George Polk Awards’ reputation as an authority on journalistic integrity, and raises dire moral questions about turning a blind eye to acts of great evil. You must not allow the mores and pressures of our time to cloud your moral compass,” Milner wrote, urging the committee reconsider.
Masoud was one of three Gazan photojournalists included in a November report by pro-Israel watchdog group Honest Reporting that showed that photographers used by the AP, Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN provided images taken as the attack was ongoing from the border area and from inside Israel — intimating they may have had advance knowledge of the assault.
The organization listed Hassan Eslaiah, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali, in addition to Masoud.
The New York Times denied that Masoud, whose photographs of an Israeli tank captured by Hamas were used by the newspaper and AP, knew of the attack. His first photographs that day were filed 90 minutes after the devastating onslaught began at around 6:30 a.m.
Eslaiah, according to the Honest Reporting report, crossed the border into Israel on October 7 and took pictures of a burning IDF tank. He also photographed attackers entering Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where dozens of civilians were massacred. The report said that in now-removed tweets posted to his X feed, Eslaiah was seen in front of the tank but not wearing a press vest that would identify him as a member of the media.
The report also raised questions about the relationship between some of the photographers and the Hamas terror group that rules Gaza. Eslaiah appeared in a photo from 2020 being kissed by Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar. Eslaiah posted the photo on January 9, 2020.
Mahmud and Ali both took pictures of people being abducted from Israel into Gaza.
Honest Reporting later said it was simply “raising questions” by publicly wondering whether Palestinian photojournalists who documented the assault and sent some of the first images had been tipped off in advance.
This week, Eslaiah became the focusof a new lawsuit filed against the Associated Press by survivors and families of victims of Hamas’s attack on the Supernova music festival on October 7, when terrorists massacred 360 people in and around the event.
They plaintiffs, dual Israeli-US nationals and Americans who attended the music festival at Kibbutz Re’im on October 7, accuse the news agency of being complicit in the Palestinian terror group’s murderous rampage by working with freelance photojournalists they believe were embedded with the terrorists that day.
AP said the case was “baseless.”